Week 6: Restoring the Fallen

Lesson 6, Restoring the Fallen, takes up Galatians 6:1-5 and asks what love does once a brother has not merely weakened but gone down. It begins in the paragraph before the chapter break, where Paul defines the spiritual as anyone walking by the Spirit and lists gentleness among the fruit two verses before he commands it, and where his warning against conceit in 5:26 runs straight into his instruction to restore in 6:1. The lesson then walks the four beats of that verse, a brother overtaken by a sin faster than he was, restored with a word the Gospels use for mending nets, handled gently, by people watching their own footing first.

Verse 2 supplies the letter's main point, the verb carry, and the law of Christ turns out to be the love command of 5:14 as Christ Himself kept it, while verses 3-5 clear away the comparison that keeps a man from stooping and distinguish the burden that crushes from the pack each one is assigned. The lesson closes at Matthew 11:28-30, where the Lord calls Himself by the very word Paul uses for gentleness, names His own load with the word of 6:5, and, in Matthew 8:17 and John 19:17, carries what would have crushed us, so that a congregation restoring a fallen brother is doing in miniature what its Lord did for all of them first.